At work currently, I'm involved in a very interesting java project. The details of it are under an NDA until launch, but I can say it has government approval, and will hopefully make a difference to the lives of the people who use it :)

It's the largest java project I've worked on so far, as there are 4 of us working full time on it. We're playing with a number of new (to me) frameworks, and they seem to be making things quite a bit easier for us. The ones that seem to have made the biggest differences are:

Struts - An MVC web framework, which provides a lot of support for the V+C layers. Validation, forms, dispatching, and other similar things are made nice and easy by it. Nicely XML driven too.

Spring - Handles dependency injection, bean generation, provides nice wrappers around some jdbc stuff, and a few other handy bits. All of it is stuff you'd generally end up writing yourself, but with spring it all melds together very nicely, and is snazily xml driven. I spent a bit of time going "what's the point, I'd do that myself", but the elegance will become apparent in a bit :)

EasyMock - dynamically builds mock objects for interfaces, and allows you to ensure that your mock objects only get used as you expect them to. Makes testing much easier, as it means you don't need dedicated mock objects for everything.

We've also been using the usual stuff like svn, half of the jakarta-commons, dbunit, and a few other random bits. It's been interesting, but tiring, hence I haven't done many journal posts recently.